01/20/2014

In all the liberal and ingenious arts, in painting, in poetry, in music, in eloquence, in philosophy, the great artist feels always the great imperfection of his own best works, and is more sensible than any man how much they fall short of that ideal perfection of which he has formed such conception, which he imitates as well as he can, but which he despairs over ever equalling. It is the inferior artist only, who is ever perfectly satisfied with his own performances.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

A human being is spirit? But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between the two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self.

-Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

When compared to the immortal standard of virtue, all human behavior will be found lacking. Whether it is because of a lack of knowledge or a lack of self-command, human beings will never be able to perfectly correspond with the injunctions of that standard, and so any impartial spectator will always find something to be desired in humanity. The emphasis that Smith puts upon the impossibility of the standard that a truly virtuous man grasps at is reminiscent of Søren Kierkegaard’s later writings on despair, which he called the sickness unto death. The sickness was found in a person in the midst of despair willing to be rid of himself, which was an act that would lead to death, the elimination of the self, if it could. Thus despair is the sickness unto death.

An example Kierkegaard used was the example of Caesar Borgia whose motto was “Either Caesar or nothing.” Borgia never would become Caesar, so did he despair about who he was since he wished to be someone else? If so, this despair was a desire for Borgia to lose who he was. Kierkegaard, being a Christian religious writer at heart, believed that everyone was, by nature, immortal, and that therefore no one could actually lose themselves. By virtue of immortality, no one could rid themselves of themselves. The sickness unto death, was thus impotent. According to Kierkegaard the realization of this impotence was a reason the Christian understood human nature whereas someone who does not accept the immortality of the soul would not.

Returning to Smith, when someone judges themselves according to the immortal standard out there, it is natural that such a judgment brings along with it the opportunity for the sickness unto death. Not only is there ignorance about what is good and beautiful in the world, but there is also outright rejection of what is good and beautiful. In addition, human beings have often failed to reach the immortal standards of virtue because of weak wills, and the inability to actually follow through with what their prudence informed them to do. When a human being sees just how much he has failed to live up to virtue, there are bound to be times when he wishes to no longer be himself. This desire need not express itself in outright suicidal thoughts, but it can also express itself in people withdrawing from the world, and becoming all but dead to the world. The one who struggles from the sickness unto death is no longer human being striving to reach up to the immemorial standard of virtue, but now someone who has given into the sickness unto death by abandoning that pursuit.

04/15/2013

“A human being is a
synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the
eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis.”

-Søren
Kierkegaard, The
Sickness Unto Death,
pg. 13

The human being, as a
synthesis between freedom and necessity, has the doom of being able
to see what could be otherwise. When he sees a hearse upon the road,
a man can imagine what could have been had the person not died and
the funeral had been unnecessary. It is he who can see not only the
emptiness of the blank slate, but also its future potential. In
turn, when our own plans are foiled by unforeseen events, we are so
often frustrated because we have the potential, as free beings, to
imagine what could have been had those plans bore fruit.

Accepting that we are
stuck between the dialectic of freedom and necessity is no easy task,
and it is one of the marks of a sage that she can accept even the
most bitter cup set before her by the necessities of the world with a
slow smile.1
There is also the Stoic belief that there is a cosmic purpose that
moves all things, including human beings, towards certain ends, and
the corresponding belief that any deviation from where the cosmic
purpose directs is certainly an evil2
Here is a great trust in cosmic Providence that guides all things
towards their proper state, and a great faith that whatever happens
will happen – Seneca: fata ducunt volentem, nonvolentem trahit.
Acceptance, though, does not mean that one is immune from the
effects of being torn apart by the dialectic that Kierkegaard
described for no man or woman is immune to the slings and arrows of
fate.

The
reason is found in the very nature of men and women as syntheses.
Though we may try to be content with the necessary in life and to
only use our freedom in a manner conditioned by those necessities, we
are able to see beyond the necessary. The imagination, whether a
curse of blessing, assures this. There will always be times when the
finite and the infinite will rend the person they inhabit to pieces
and it is here that the opportunity for despair to enter the soul of
that person. This despair, this sickness unto death leads the person
to then will their own destruction so that he could be free of the
dialectic between the finite and the infinite. The ravine between
potential and actuality has become so great that the human being
caught within the dialectic wishes self-consumption, but the despair
is impotent since no person can rid himself of himself. We
necessarily are, and even by suicide we do not rid ourselves of
ourselves since either we are immortal (and thus we can never not not
exist) or by annihilating ourselves, we rid ourselves entirely rather
than riding ourselves of ourselves3.
Ultimately, who we are is both a blessing and a curse, and a curse
that can lead to the deepest despair.

Πάντα ῥεῖ.
That is a basic truth of this world, without which neither we
ourselves nor our progenitors would not be. Though the death of
fire is not the death of air just as the death of air is not the
birth of water, the world is in a constant flux, and making sense of
whether we can ever step into the same river twice is a question that
has eluded some of the greatest human minds. Not only does the flux
and strife of the world perplex, the two tear about the necessity
within the human person from his freedom by tearing about the is
from the ought.
It sunders the dreams of human beings, frustrates their desires, and
leads them down paths they would have preferred to have left
untrodden; for those unprepared, this flux can bring about despair as
they find themselves that their image of who they are no longer
corresponds to the reality. Within a world in which even the most
beautiful flower must wilt, the most excellent human being die, and
the most breath-taking landscape erode, all human ideas about how the
world ought to be are but
delusions that cannot stand the test of time for the world is but
flux and all must into being according to flux.4
Perhaps this is the ultimate wound that living within a fallen world
will inflict upon every human being: No matter how fervently we may
thirst for Eden, no matter how hard we may work for it, and no matter
how real Eden seems to be in our lives when the world's flux favors
us, it cannot last; the synthesis of freedom and necessity will
eventually be torn in two different directions: the is and
the ought. Even the
most blissful moments, when we seem to have found a joy that seems in
the moment resilient to whatever the world matches against it, cannot
last, and thus the despair creeps into our lives when we discover we
no longer will to be ourselves, but something different.

After
all, the human being is between freedom and necessity. With his
freedom, he may choose his own Platonic image of himself, build a
wall around it in his mind against the strife of the world, but
ultimately he will be as much a creation of necessary conditions in
the world around him as that Platonic image. Indeed, that the human
being is can have his image of himself depart from the actuality of
the world, even if that brings about the occasion for despair, is a
mark of his superiority over the world of pure necessity, and the
excellence that it is even to be capable of despair.5
After all, it marks that we are capable of imagining more than what
is, and that with our freedom we may choose, however impotently, to
follow against the direction that the strife of the world necessarily
drags him along. What then is the human being supposed to do with
his freedom? Within a fallen world of strife, the only way to be
able to unto the splendid visions of a world that ought to
be in contrast to what is
is to embrace the tragic. To accept that the pain and despair of
wishing for the sublime despite what is is
itself a more excellent state than the apathetic acceptance of
whatever the natural order of things brings about.

After
all, like the love that Kierkegaard speaks of in Either/Or
our concepts of what ought to
be are eternities built upon the churning froth that is the temporal
world.6
They may be able to be realized in moments and in fleeting visions
(or hallucinations) of an empyrean heaven where the ought
necessarily is and
where there is no strafe to change it, but that is all. Like
romantic love, our romantic ideals of the world seek eternity, and by
that they seek not so much an infinite time-horizon, but rather an
unchanging state of affairs where freedom and necessity are aligned.,
in Either/Or,
Kierkegaard describes first love as this unification.7
Just as Kierkegaard reflects melancholically about the impossibility
of ever fully realizing the hopes of first love, so to we can reflect
upon the inevitable failure to fulfill the demands of the Romantic
image of what ought to
be. Indeed, the failure of ever fulfilling the hopes of first love
that Kierkegaard writes about, is but an example of the more
universal truth that the human being is a synthesis that is rent
apart by the two different forces constituting that synthesis: one a
necessity that finds its genesis in the strife of a fallen world, the
other in an elevated capability of choosing otherwise.

When
the synthesis will inevitably be pulled in opposing directions and
when the opportunity for despair lurks everywhere, ready to throw
even the most excellent human being into the sickness unto death, we
must remember that the possibility of the sickness is itself an
excellence of sorts. After all, if the possibility of despair were
to be annihilated from the world, then it would also annihilate the
human potential to recognize the ought and
to perceive, even if but for a fleeting moment, that empyrean heaven
that strife will never allow for in the world. After all, one need
not recognize the opportunity for despair without drinking from its
cup, and the recognition that there is a schism between freedom and
necessity can itself be a beautiful, if not melancholic,
realization.8
This is where the human fascination for the tragic comes in for how
else would pieces like Sophocles' Three Theban Plays
endure through history, touch the human soul, be so widely considered
beautiful, and yet be constituted by so many opportunities for
despair if there was not something wonderfully excellent about the
tragic? Without despair, without that sickness that can drown the
human spirit in sorrow, then there is no capability to discern the is
from the ought,
to see beyond the grim reality of the actual, and to see the
tormentingly blissful potential of what could be.

Just
as the Heraclitean strife of the world is necessary, so too is the
sickness unto death. If human beings are to be free agents, then they
must be able to fathom more than simply is,
and to be able to strive towards ends that they have decided ought
to be. However, that does not
mean that those ends will become reality, and that in turn can tear
the free agent apart as he sees the potential yet must live within
the actual. Thus the human being's very nature as a free agent is
all that's needed to create the opportunity for the sickness unto
death to invade his soul, and ergo there is something beautifully
tragic about that affliction whose potential must be celebrated
because it is rooted in our free nature.

2“There
are thus two reasons why you should be contented with whatever
happens to you. Firstly, that it was for you that it came about, and
it was prescribed for you and stands in a special relationship to
you as something that was woven into your destiny from the beginning
and issues from the most venerable of causes, and secondly that, for
the power which governs the whole, that which comes to each of us
individually contributes to its own well-being and perfection, and,
by Zeus, its very continuance. For the perfection of the whole
suffers a mutilation if you cut off even the smallest particle from
the coherence and continuity of its causes no less than of its
parts; and you do this, so far as you can, whenever you are
discontented, and, in a certain sense, you destroy it.” -Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations 5.50

3“For
example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is 'Either Caesar or
nothing' does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this
also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be
Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself.” - Søren
Kierkegaard, The
Sickness Unto Death,
pg. 19.

4“You
should know that war is comprehensive, that justice is strife, that
all things come about in accordance with strife and with what must
be.” -Heraclitus as quoted by Origen in Against Celsus VI
xliii.

5“The
possibility of this sickness is man's superiority over the animal,
and his superiority distinguishes him in quite another way than does
his erect walk, for it indicates infinite erectness and sublimity,
that he is spirit. “ - Søren
Kierkegaard, The
Sickness Unto Death,
pg. 15.

6“It
has now become apparent how romantic love was built upon an
illusion, and that its eternity was built upon the temporal and
that, although the knight remained deeply convinced of its absolute
constancy, there nevertheless was no certainly of this, since its
trial and temptation had hitherto been in an entirely external
medium.” -Søren Kierkegaard,
Either/Or,
pg. 28.

7“So
we turn back to the first love. It is the unity of freedom and
necessity. The individual feels drawn by an irrestibile power to
another individual but precisely therein feels his freedom.” -
Søren
Kierkegaard, Either/Or,
pg. 45.

8“It
is beautiful and healthy if a person has been unfortunate in his
first love, has learned to know the pain of it but nevertheless
remains faithful to his love, has kept his faith in this first love;
it is beautiful if in the course of the years he ht times very
vividly recalls it, and even though his soul has been sufficiently
healthy to bid farewell, as it were, to that kind of life in order
to dedicate himself to something higher; it is beautiful in order to
dedicate himself to something higher; it is beautiful if he then
sadly remembers it as something that was admittedly not perfect but
yet was so very beautiful.” -Søren
Kierkegaard, Either/Or,
pg. 37.